


Into the Calm

by tehtarik



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Rogue One, Road Trips, Spiritassassin Exchange, baze x chirrut, parachutes are for the faithless, random worldbuilding, some banter, spiritassassin, the adventures of baze and chirrut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 23:37:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11931720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: “I’ll ask again, just for ease of mind. Is Baze really alright with you volunteering him again?”“He goes where I’ll go,” said Chirrut.“He goes where you tell him to go,” Sunhei corrected. “There’s a subtle difference.”------And that was where everything started to go wrong.





	Into the Calm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disterra (mutantrentboy)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutantrentboy/gifts).



> This is a horribly overdue fic written for @thedrawfill on tumblr, for the SpiritAssassin Exchange. I feel really ashamed that this is so late, & I hope you can forgive me. *hides* I hope I fulfilled your prompts (domestic, hurt/comfort, romantic, mild nsfw) in some way or another. I tried to cram all the prompts in here, and I hope at least one of them worked.
> 
> Title & mood inspired by this vocaloid song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxx4z64GH38 
> 
> (because Baze and Chirrut and the whole Rogue One mess always makes me sad, no matter what type of fic)

 

 

 

“Are you sure,” said Disciple Sunhei Manra, “that Baze _really_ wants to do this?”

Chirrut’s smoke-pale eyes gleamed. He smiled that charlatan smile of his. “You don’t know Baze like I do.”

Sunhei narrowed her own eyes at him. Chirrut was resting on a stone bench in the Serendipity Sculpture Garden at the back of the Temple, his finger tracing a pattern on his knee. Round and round his finger went, dictated into a slow spiral that had no core.

It was a sign that Chirrut was not being entirely honest. It was also a sign that he was not even bothering to appear honest.

“You and him both have just come back from a two-month assignment at Raheda-im. We’ve got other Guardians willing to do this.”

“We’ve had a few days’ rest since returning.”

Sunhei shrugged. This made things easier for her. She unslung the hand-woven lokka-fur satchel from around her shoulders and drew out a datapad. A projection of a silvery map flickered from the screen, mountains and plains and valleys studded with clusters of settlements rotating around her hand.

“You’ll be going to the village of Nhazardeh. The local clinic transmitted a petition to the Temple, requesting a new med-droid with all the updated medical protocols.” The map swerved when she spoke the name of the place, and zoomed in on a tiny group of dots at the foot of a cliff wall. “I don’t actually have a record of when a Guardian or anyone from any of the Whills Orders last visited the village. It’s one of the more remote places in Jedha--no direct transport routes to the place.”

“Even better. We’ll do it.” Chirrut’s response was a little too flighty for Sunhei’s liking.

A butterfly with wings like ochre tongues of flame flitted past Chirrut’s face, and in a flash, his finger flew to his nose, intercepting its flight, forcing it to perch on the edge of his fingernail.

“Penumbral fritillary,” he said.

“Actually,” Sunhei said, “it’s a common dune-monarch.”

“I know it wasn’t a fritillary.” Chirrut’s smile turned wistful. “But I wanted it to be. I’ve almost forgotten how the patterns on their wings look like.”

The dune-monarch opened its wings, closed it, opened again. Butterfly messages, Sunhei remembered. A game she used to play in her early days as a Temple novice. Catch a butterfly, read its beating wings, open-shut, open-shut, a cipher encrypted into chalky rings and dots.

Chirrut used to tell his rubbish fortunes from butterfly wings, when he could still see them.

“You, Sunhei Manra, are going to fall down a deep dark hole, the fount of all wisdom. But you’ll find treasure, lots of it, and be the richest person in all the galaxy. Except you can’t get out of that hole, the fount of all wisdom, which is actually also a rancor’s pit _._ ”

In those days, she had shot right back at him, “And you, Chirrut Îmwe, are probably going to get into trouble if you don’t hurry along with the washing up.”

“And Baze is probably the rancor,” young Chirrut quipped, ignoring her.

To which an indignant Baze, who was also on the same cleaning shift as them, proceeded to fling a scouring pad at Chirrut and splash soap in his eyes, and just like that, yet another quarrel had ignited between them both.

Sunhei sat on the bench beside Chirrut. He twitched his finger and the butterfly ascended. The sun was low in the sky, pulling long shadows from the many-headed, many-bodied sculptures of the Serendipity Garden. Chirrut shifted his feet. He seemed restless.

“I’ll ask again, just for ease of mind. Is Baze _really_ alright with you volunteering him again?”

“He goes where I’ll go.”

“He goes where you tell him to go,” Sunhei corrected. “There’s a subtle difference.”

“You ask him yourself if you don’t believe me,” Chirrut laughed. “But you should see him. We’ve been home three days and he’s already restless, rearing to go on our next assignment.”

 

 

* * *

“I’m wasted,” said Baze, peeling off the outer layer of his kasaya and slinging it on a hook. “That last assignment aged me by ten years, and we just got back from it three days ago, and now you want us to go on _another_? Haven’t we done enough?”

Chirrut made straight for his favourite stool by the window. His forehead brushed against the hanging tendrils of the kuulfern, spilling out of an old tin kettle suspended from the ceiling. Ah Seh, the resident ophidian, which came with the fern that Baze had bought from the local seed merchant, slid off a frond and slithered onto Chirrut’s shoulder, sucked towards the warmth of his body, twin tongues flicking.

“There is no _enough_ in the Force.” Chirrut stroked Ah Seh’s speckled chin. “The Force has no measure. And cannot be measured. Only what _is_ , and what _can be_ , and the latter can be converted to the former, anyway.”

“That’s a diversion.” Baze shook his head. “Let me rephrase. Haven’t we done enough for _this week_ , at least?”

“There are those out there who need us. To ignore them would surely go against our code.”

“I fear we may be denying our fellow Guardians the chance for _them_ to fulfil the code.” Baze sat down heavily on the solitary wooden divan and stretched his legs out as far they could go, the muscles in his calves and thighs uncoiling.

Their shared living quarters didn’t have much furniture, and yet there was an air of clutter and warmth to it: there were a couple of stools, a squat table that Baze had made with his own hands, along with the wooden divan which he was sitting on. The few cushions currently being flattened by his weight, he had stuffed them himself and knitted the covers. A hand-dyed bantha-hair rug covered the floor, and in the far corner of the room were two bedrolls, side by side. There was also a tiny kitchen with a cooker and a gas cylinder and an oven with an antiquated analogue dial. Plus a full tea set complete with a tea tray, strainer, coin-sized cups, teapot, pitcher and a squat clay dragon as a tea pet.

When they had first moved in together, out of the novices’ dormitories, their quarters had been little more than a couple of adjoined bare rooms right at the back of the Temple compound. At night, the walls kept no heat in, and they’d spent the first few months shivering together, pressed into each other’s bodies under layers of quilts, complaining and cursing each other’s icy hands or feet or lips.

But gradually, during their free hours, Baze began fixing and installing generators and heating coils, nailed in extra shelves and storage cupboards. Making furniture, buying cheap appliances, growing an array of indoor plants. Filling space.

Home, to Baze, was a concept that he’d spun together with his hands. He’d put together most of their home, this shared space, but it was Chirrut who held everything in place. He’d built and sewn and set everything around Chirrut.

Near the window, where Chirrut now sat, hung a clanking collection of old kettles and pots filled with soil and brimming with trailing greenery, all purchased from the seed merchant at the souk. Kuulferns and saltmeadow runners and huangsha bracken, most of them non-flowering but tough enough to withstand Jedha’s cold. There were also more delicate perennials that died and came back to life, and then died again. The browning tongues of orchids lapped at the dilute sunlight.

“Maybe you’re right,” Chirrut mused. “We’ll take a break after this assignment. Resign ourselves to city-bound duties and maintain a two li radius from home for the rest of our lives. How’s that?”

“You make us sound like a pair of old banthas.”

“Well, it was _you_ who first said you’d aged.”

Chirrut untwined Ah Seh from around his wrist and held the snake back to its plant. The ophidian slithered upwards, reluctantly. He went to the kitchen and started clattering about.

“How about I make you some tea to make up for the work? Sour plum? Your favourite.”

Baze grunted his approval. Tea--provided it was the right kind of tea, and that meant absolutely no tarine-- always had a mollifying effect on him. The hot fragrance of sour plum tea wafted through the room.

Chirrut flipped on the old radio that sat on a shelf and tuned in to the latest episode of _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness,_ his current favourite radio drama broadcast, which was a massively schmaltzy Alderaanian soap opera with actual opera in it. The plot, as far as Baze knew, consisted of warring galactic factions, an impossible tangle of family relations where everyone was everyone’s third cousin or so, and a pair of swooning lovers who didn’t do much except swoon and sing their feelings for each other.

The lancet vocals of Bouli Kenn Meshanta, Chirrut’s favourite galactic opera singer, burst into full soprano bloom at those hated opening credits.

Baze groaned. “Do you really have to?”

“The last chapter ended on a cliffhanger,” said Chirrut mildly. “Luin Dil was on his way to meet Dawan Dun-ec-Silin as promised, but he was confronted by an armed gang hired by Dawan’s brother-in-law.”

“I know how it’s going to end,” said Baze. “This Luin person is going to marry this Dawan person and they live happily ever after.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Chirrut. “They haven’t even broadcasted the ending yet.”

“ _All_ the holodramas you listen to end this way.”

Chirrut brought the tea to Baze, carefully. The cup steamed between his hands. The tea was rosebud-hued, pristine, passed through a strainer at least three times. He hadn’t drunk it yet, but already, Baze felt a hot molten swell in his chest. He put his hands around Chirrut’s. The pink tea was a circle of warmth between their hands. He took the cup and set it aside, and instead pulled Chirrut onto his lap so he was straddled by Chirrut, brushed his fingers against Chirrut’s cheeks and ears, stopping, as always, on Chirrut’s eyelids, which quivered beneath his touch. An eyelash came loose and Baze flicked it away. He kissed the edges of Chirrut’s smile.

“I think,” said Baze, in the most serious voice that he could muster, “that there’s maybe a chance that I love you.”

“As much as Dawan loves Luin?”

“Maybe more.”

“What a coincidence,” said Chirrut cheekily. “Maybe I feel the same.”

As if on cue, Bouli Kenn Meshanta began yodelling the final verse of the opening song.

 

 

* * *

For their assignment to the remote village of Nhazardheh, they were allocated one of the Temple’s landspeeders.

“You are _not_ to modify the transport in any way.” Sunhei’s stern tone had been mostly directed at Baze. “Temple resources are valuable and are to be treated with care.”

“Alright,” said Baze, sourly.

Chirrut heard the reluctance in his voice and grinned.

A previous assignment had seen Baze open the hatch of a different Temple speeder, dismantle parts of the turbines and then making some extra fittings here, reconnecting the odd cable here and there, upgrading to a six-barrel carburettor.

They’d reached their destination in half the time.

But when they returned to the Temple, Sunhei had not been pleased with the extra modifications. The speeder revved so loudly that windows and doors shook in their frames. Walls and floors of buildings vibrated with the amplified migraine of the engines.

They also drew the attention of groups of raucous teenagers who hooted and crowded around the speeder as it throbbed and caused minor shockwaves with each revolution of the engines.

“Nice ride, Elder Brother!”

“Is this what Guardians do at the Temple? Sign me up!”

“Elder Brother, can you do a burnout with that?”

“Can you do a jump-the-levee? Or a flip-the-laobing?”

Sunhei had _definitely_ not been pleased. “You’re supposed to be Guardians of the Whills. Not the shady crew of an illegal podrace.”

The village of Nhazardheh, according to Sunhei, was in the Mizzul Valley, at the base of the Rokanya Cliffs, east of a large network of kyber mines.

“Avoid the mines,” Sunhei told them the night before they left. “They’re deserted this time of the year because of NaJedha’s magnetic field affecting the kyber resonances. The crystals are more prone to releasing localised EMPs, knocking out any machinery or operating systems in the vicinity.”

They left for Nhazardheh early, when the Temple was mostly quiet, save for a faint bustle from the kitchens. Only Sunhei came to see them off. Chirrut heard the shiver in her voice as she spoke, the flap of her extra shawl in the wind.

“It should take you six days to reach the Mizzul Valley.” Sunhei’s voice was hoarse. “Keep in contact, and the Force of Others go with you. And don’t fight too much.”

“Hear that,” Baze said as he jogged at Chirrut’s elbow. “She’s talking to you.”

“ _Both_ of you,” Sunhei snapped and then laughed. “And keep your hands off the engines, Baze Malbus!”

Baze flew the speeder down the ramp of the mesa, upon which sat NiJedha, and soon they were racing through the darkling desert, heading towards the ashen splotch of dawn. They travelled for nearly three hours, until Chirrut became bored of trying to meditate. At the back in the cargo compartment, the crate with the disassembled med droid and other courtesy medical supplies that Sunhei had acquired rattled with the thrum of the speeder’s repulsors.

Chirrut reached at the bank of controls, fiddled with the comm system, and turned and turned at a dial. There was transmission available, and he swerved through a range of frequencies until he found his favourite channel. Which happened to be relaying an episode of _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness._ He settled back in his seat and folded his arms behind his head.

“Chirrut,” Baze groaned. “Can’t you just pray in silence?”

“I want to know what happens. It was revealed in the last chapter that Dawan has a long-lost twin who was separated from her at birth. And she’s about to meet her. And Luin Dil was about to propose. Though his colleague from work who rather fancies him is trying to obstruct his plans. To make matters more complicated, Dawan’s boss is also having an affair with her other sister who just may have connections to the shady secret society that’s planning to incite war between the factions.”

“That sounds like a terrible plot.”

“Dawan’s family and Luin’s family are both also on the brink of a clan war. And it all started because Dawan’s father criticised Luin’s father’s choice of house slippers. There’s also a mysterious stranger whose origins nobody knows, and the only thing known about him is that he’s a really good yueqin player.”

“I stick with my verdict,” Baze muttered. Then he turned off the comm system.

“I was listening to that!”

“I need to concentrate,” Baze growled. “You play that stupid drama every day.”

“Every day is a different episode.”

“And today’s episode is peace and quiet.”

“Fine,” Chirrut snapped. He began humming Bouli Kenn Meshanta’s song instead. “ _I saw you with your astral eyes, I took your hand and asked for your heart…_ ”

Baze groaned again, and Chirrut hummed louder. But after singing the song for the fourth time non-stop, the same boredom swamped him again.

“Do you think we’ll finally see those legendary sagwai?”

“You ask this every time we go out on an assignment. You know very well they don’t exist,” answered Baze.

“But we’ve heard of them. So they must, in some form, exist.”

“If they do, then they must be microscopic.”

“No,” said Chirrut, “they’re big. As big as a crawler unit.”

“They don’t exist.”

Baze drove, directed by the pinging of the speeder’s navigation system, constantly correcting and calibrating their route.

Chirrut was restful, basking in the paltry warmth from the morning sun and the drone of the engines and the bob of the transport on its repulsorfield. Baze’s familiar presence by his side.

If only he could see the desert again, the desert and its many faces. The looming mesas and cliffs, the plunge of canyons, the sparkle of icy oases in the distance. NaJedha in the sky, a phantom guardian.

He hadn’t felt this restful in ages. For the last few months, he had been plagued by a nervous energy; he drifted through meditation sessions and scriptural talks, dazed and impatient at the same time. The days seemed chewed at the corners, missing pieces. He tossed and turned at night, drove Baze crazy sometimes, dragged Baze off on one assignment after another, picked up habits that worried and infuriated Baze, like practicing zama-shiwo in the middle of the night barefoot, in the cold.

But out here in the desert, swathed in the sun’s warmth, cradled in movement, there was a lull in the centre of his being, the closest to peace in a long time.

“Baze?”

“Present.”

“This feels nice,” said Chirrut. “It’s nice out here, don’t you think?”

 

 

* * *

They passed cliffs and crooked rows of dunes, boulder fields and old monuments cracking in the wind, ancient mile-markers that measured ancient miles – or rather, measurements no longer used in any part of the galaxy. The speeder’s navigation system directed them across dusty stretches of land that were floodplains thousands of years ago, along the withered arteries of former watercourses, the fossils of rivers. Sometimes they passed tiny settlements, clusters of yurts around oases that were little more than puddles caught between rocks.

On the third day of travelling, they came across the sagwai.

All day long, Baze had been negotiating a passage through narrow valleys, treacherous with stone arches and irregular rock formations, but in the late afternoon, they emerged onto a vast sandy flatland. There were no dunes for miles, not even a boulder to break the sprawling heterogeneity of the landscape.

He brought the speeder to a halt in the middle of the plains. “Time for a break. I need to stretch my legs.”

Next to him, Chirrut didn’t move. “Where are we?”

“According to the navigation system, Khashan Plains.”

“Tell me how it is.”

“Flat. Peaceful. Feels like it goes on forever. Kind of nice, actually.”

“Any dunes? Rocks?”

“No. It's like an ocean, the quietest ocean you ever saw.”

There was a pause. Then Chirrut said, “It isn’t wise to stop here.”

Baze had already swung himself out of the speeder. His boots sank an inch into the soft ground. “Because of sandstorms?”

“No, because these flat sandy expanses are the perfect habitat for sagwai.”

“Aren’t we lucky, then? Because there’s no such thing,” Baze replied cheerfully.

“They make you sleep. Then they attack you when you’re most vulnerable,” Chirrut persisted.

“I definitely could do with some sleep.”

The sand was so soft, softer than most other parts of the desert that was Jedha. Jedhan sand was usually abrasive; the winds blowing in from the eastern flint steppes were sharp enough to wound. But here the wind was languid, barely a whisper of air against his exposed cheeks. The sand was fine as ash, as light as ash, settling ash-pale in the folds of his dust shroud.

Baze walked away from the speeder, half in a dream. The calmest place in the whole desert. On and on he walked, the muscles in his body loosening, feeling like they were disengaging from his tired bones, floating free and unstrained, his mind featherlight and free of the troublesome matrix of blood and flesh that bound everything together, bound him into place.

He turned back to call to Chirrut, to ask him walk with him.

Chirrut was standing by the speeder. Something strange about him. His posture was stooped, inert, face frozen into the trace of a frown. Baze felt the tightrope tension emanating from him, from the way he gripped his staff, head tilted to one side, riveted. Listening. Time was a thread strung thinly between them.

What was he listening for?

Then Chirrut sprang to motion, waving at Baze, shouting.

“What?” Baze shouted back, because he couldn’t quite hear what Chirrut was saying. His voice was small across the plains.

“Come back! Come back to me!” Chirrut hollered, his voice just as shrunken. “Get off the sand!”

Baze felt it, then. The ground falling away at his feet, sand sliding downward, his boots losing grip, as he found himself teetering at the top of a new slope forming right beneath him. Sand swirled downwards, a giant dusty maelstrom, as though the entire desert were emptying into a sinkhole. Something large stirred at the depths of the hole. Baze turned and took off, slipping and sliding on the fine sand. Another sinkhole opened before him, and he skidded to a stop, and then changed direction.

Across the plains, the once-tranquil surface was now seething, the ground dipping into new gradients, the substrate sieving away into emptiness. Out of a sinkhole erupted a massive elongated body, segmented, thrashing. Each segment sheathed in tawny chitinous plates studded with florets of living crystals that caught the sunlight and refracted it dizzyingly in Baze’s eyes. Were they kyber crystals or something else? Baze didn’t know. Its head was crowned with sigmoidal horns, interlocked like the horns of the antelope found on the Lishtrali Ranges in the south. Instead of eyes, more jagged crystals bulged out of its head like phosphorescent tumours. A slitted mouth squeezed open, wider and wider, revealing notched rows of white mineral teeth, good to snag on flesh and pierce and grind bone.

The sagwai lunged at Baze and he dodged. The crystal-cluster eyes glimmered as the creature sank bank into its hole, disintegrating into sand. Another creature rose to his right, another to his left. Vaguely, he heard someone shouting.

_Chirrut._

Panic crested from the depths of his gut. His blaster was still in the speeder, so he pulled out the knife strapped at his boot. When one of the sagwai made for him, he hacked at it. The blade dug into living body, opening up living skin, but no living blood poured from the wound, only torrents of sand crashing out. The creature hissed and dived back down into the ground, melting into substrate.

Here he was, fighting off giant worm-shaped sand bags -- _sagwai_ , Chirrut called them. To think Chirrut was right after all.

Then, he began to fall, sliding downward on his back, into one of the holes. From the depths of the burrow, he saw the glow of teeth. They were definitely fractured crystals growing out of its mouth, and they were nothing like the peaceful glowing kyber in the Temple chambers.

“Chirrut!” he shouted. “Run! Get off these plains!”

The head of the sagwai shot up from the hole and something hard crashed into his side. Baze inhaled its breath and it was sweet, almost perfumed. Its breath felt like stagnation; its breath felt like sleep, thick and dreamless. The teeth began to look like sugared lights.

Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing. Sleep. He was tired, so very tired. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if he stopped for a moment. Perhaps he could—just—perhaps--

There was a hiss and a whistle of supercharged air. A bolt of energy, the antithesis to the frizzling, staticky breath of the sagwai, and the sand erupted around him. Baze was thrown out of the hole by the explosion, sent reeling. His ears sang, his eyes blinking at the sudden heat.

Chirrut was standing at a distance, lightbow in hand. He raised it and aimed at an angle to the ground before releasing another bolt, which sent another explosion of sand. The sagwai keened. Writhed. Shot back down, dissolving into the ground. Or became the ground. It was hard to tell.

Baze dragged himself up, feeling heavy. Still tired. Impossibly calm. Disengaged. He stumbled toward Chirrut and grasped Chirrut’s shoulder, half pulling him along, and half leaning against him. Chirrut slid his arm around Baze’s waist, stabilising him, and together they ran back to the speeder.

Baze flew the speeder higher than usual on its repulsorfield, just while they crossed the rest of the Khashan Plains. He kept a close eye for any movement in the sands below, but the landscape had stilled again. The holes in the ground had vanished, the sand filled them in, making everything level and flat again.

He felt strangely numb about the whole sagwai attack. His mouth was gluey, his tongue swollen with questions he couldn’t be bothered asking.

Chirrut didn’t say much either.

Once the plains were behind them, and the landscape reared crooked and uncertain again with the usual dunes and mesas and cliffs, Baze reached his hand toward Chirrut. Chirrut’s hand was unexpectedly warm. Or maybe his own hand had gone cold. Whatever it was, reaching out to touch Chirrut was a reflex.

“Thank you,” he forced the words out, and they sounded slushy, like a mouthful of snowmelt.

Chirrut slipped his fingers through Baze’s, locking them together and squeezing. The pressure felt good, _real_.

“Stop somewhere,” Chirrut said. “We need to treat that wound now.”

“I’m not injured,” Baze answered, surprised.

“On your right hip. And they say I’m the blind one.”

Chirrut was right. Now that he’d pointed it out, Baze was aware of the slow throb at his right flank, waking him bit by unpleasant bit from his stupor. The sagwai must have hit its mark after all. His robes were slightly damp. Not too much bleeding, then.

He stopped the speeder in the shade of a cliff. By then, the pain was beginning to burrow deep into his flesh. Like teeth twisting into him, a slow, slow bite. He staggered out of the vehicle. Chirrut followed, staff in one hand and a medical kit in the other.

Chirrut knelt beside him.

“Sit down.” He gestured to the space in front of him. “And lean against me.”

“That's a very awkward position to be treating someone.”

“You remember what I told you about sagwai?”

Baze stared down at him. Chirrut didn't lift his head to meet his gaze. “No. Every time you told me about them, I tuned you out. Obviously I'm an idiot.”

He caught a flicker of something like triumph in Chirrut's expression, in his spasm of a smile. Then it was gone, and Chirrut gestured him to sit again. So Baze did, half-slumped against Chirrut, the pain an incandescent coil in his side.

“They say,” said Chirrut, his mouth close to Baze's ear, and Baze drifted into a lull, “the sagwai come from the ground. Like the crawling creatures and the minerals and yes, the kyber crystals. They say when you commune with the crystals, they talk back to you. They grow their attention upon you, especially if you are attuned to their resonances. Then they are attuned to you, too. And then there is the question: what happens when you stop communing with them? These kyber crystals retain the memory of resonances, and then what happens to them?”

Baze leaned back deeper into Chirrut's shoulder.

“The sagwai’s bite has anaesthetic properties,” Chirrut continued. “It also makes you sleep. Then it kills you. But when I clear out its venom, I take away your rest. I steal the sleep from you. I also wake you up. Do you hear me?”

Baze mumbled a reply. Chirrut's lips lingered against his temples. Fingers trailed across his scalp, along fraught pathways, the nerves in Baze’s skin tingling, a knot of tiny circuits begging to be completed.

“Baze.” Chirrut snaked an arm around Baze's chest, and he felt the plastoid of Chirrut’s impeller gauntlet press through his robes. “Take it off.”

It was hard to do as Chirrut asked, and his fingers were clumsy. They felt larger than they looked, swollen, insensitive. But he managed to unfasten the gauntlet and it fell to the ground with a clatter. Chirrut used his other hand to pull open the front of Baze’s robes and lift the undershirt. Baze glanced downward and spluttered a curse. The gash on his side was a red ragged mouth along his hip. Chirrut pushed Baze’s head away, tilted Baze’s face upward to his chin.

“No need to look.” Chirrut’s voice was short, almost harsh, but there was a tenderness that Baze found reassuring. “It’s a shallow wound. But it’ll hurt once I clear out the sagwai venom. More than you’ll expect it to hurt.”

“You seem to know a lot about creatures that were supposedly mythical until today,” Baze said.

“Mythical? Never for me.”

Chirrut applied a bacta-pad to the wound and the pain flared, splitting into white-hot rivers through his body.

Baze didn’t even realise he’d been half-convulsing against Chirrut’s grip, swearing and choking, until Chirrut removed the pad and cradled his head, one arm still holding him securely into place.

Chirrut was talking. “Who communes with the kyber underground now that most of the old peoples of the desert are gone? They remember, these kyber crystals, they too still hold the resonances of the ancients. They remember the balance they struck with those peoples, bonded in the Force. In some parts of the desert these resonances linger on, unbalanced. I’ve heard they turn dark. They become the sagwai. But you hear lots of things.”

Sweat was trickling off Chirrut’s brow with the effort of holding Baze still. A warm drop fell on Baze’s cheek.

“Sometimes you hear that the sagwai come from the minerals and are nourished by the minerals of the earth, sometimes you hear they feed on the abandoned kyber. Sometimes you hear that all the sands of Jedha are just the ashes of cities, the powdered bones of the old peoples whose names we don’t know. Only the sagwai know and the sagwai don’t know us or talk our talk.”

“Chirrut,” Baze spoke his name through grated teeth.

“Shout all you like,” Chirrut said. His voice, level. “But just know that I’ve got you. I’ve got you and I’m going nowhere.”

Baze drew in a breath. Even that felt difficult. The expansion and contraction of his diaphragm straining against the wound. He felt awake now, wide awake and all too aware of the pain. “Never thought I’d say this, but--just---talk. Just. Keep talking. Don’t go silent on me. Ever.”

“I want you to listen very carefully to me, Baze Malbus.” Chirrut released Baze’s face and continued to disinfect the wound. “You need to focus on something while I do this. You need to repeat after every word I say. And put all your attention into it. Can you do that?”

“Is this—some kind of game?” Baze shut his eyes, and was engulfed in the warm red patterns of his eyelids.

Chirrut promptly flicked his nose. Not sharp enough to hurt, but enough to send Baze’s eyes flying open again. “ _Can_ you do this?”

“Yes,” Baze said. Because that was all he could manage.

“Good. Repeat after me.” Chirrut pressed something that looked like a surgical stapler to the wound. “ _I saw you with your astral eyes_.”

“ _What_?”

“Say it. Just say it.”

Baze swore. But he complied. “I saw you, _kriff_ , your astral eyes.”

“ _I took your hand and asked for your heart_.” Chirrut released the staple and it punched down, clipping together part of the wound.

Of course Chirrut would make him repeat Bouli Kenn Meshanta’s lyrics from the _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness_ theme song.

Baze cursed again and again. But he repeated every word. He forced every inch of his concentration into each word, into Chirrut’s voice, which became increasingly strained, as he sutured together the wound.

Half senseless with agony (and just the tiniest smidgen of amusement), Baze recited line after line.

_I stood on a red rock and made a wish_  
_And sent it spinning to the stars_  
_Oh my beloved will you take my heart_  
_Will you take my hand_  
_And lead me to where all the wishes go._

This was _definitely_ his punishment for not believing Chirrut in the first place.

 

 

* * *

Sunhei was transcribing Whills prayers into a readable code for droids when her holopad lit up. A holo of Baze winked to life. Through the blue translucent projection, he looked drained.

“Baze,” she said in greeting. “Everything on track?”

“I’d say we’re making acceptable progress,” Baze answered, “considering we stumbled into a whole bloody nest of—of---Chirrut calls them _sagwai_.”

There was a pause as Sunhei digested this. “There’s no such thing.”

But Baze didn’t smile. “Funny. For imaginary creatures, they sure do bite hard. And don’t tell Chirrut you said that--he still hasn’t forgiven me for not believing him.”

It was a strange tale that Baze told her. _Sagwai_ had been a made-up word of Chirrut’s when he was a child.

“What do they look like?” Sunhei and Baze had asked him, and all Chirrut said was, “You’ll know when you see one.”

When they were growing up together as novices, he always spun stories about things nobody had ever heard of, usually in the middle of the night, when she and him and a reluctant Baze were wandering the passageways and grounds of the Temple by torchlight. Stories about the ancient creatures that turned in their sleep beneath their feet, whose dreams caused people to do strange things and make fool choices and go on unheard-of journeys to unheard-of places. Stories about tiny clay people that wandered between the paving cracks of NiJedha’s streets, stories about how the whole moon sat in the middle of the coils of a large cold-blooded snake, which was why Jedha was in a perpetually frigid state.

As they’d grown older, the stories thinned and grew fewer, or maybe Chirrut kept them to himself mostly because he couldn’t prove their truth, and anyway, there was so much other text and discourse from the Whills Canon to cram their heads with.

“You should have turned around and come home immediately after the attack,” Sunhei told Baze.

“We’re more than halfway to Nhazardheh.”

Sunhei turned on her datapad and brought up the progress of their journey, as relayed by the tracker in their speeder. “You’re about three thousand standard li from Mizzul Valley.”

“We’ll make it. We’ll go all the way. Might as well. Chirrut will hate coming home empty-handed.”

Ah Seh, the ophidian that belonged to Chirrut, stirred by the lit stove. Chirrut had entrusted the snake to her care before he’d left on this assignment. So far, Ah Seh had done little except eat a lizard and sleep by the heating coil.

“Did you capture any visuals? Of these sagwai?”

“No. Too busy not trying to get eaten by them.” Baze paused. He frowned. “I’ve got some visuals of where we are making camp for the night, though. About four hundred li from the kyber mines, at the ruins of Hwa-sidik. Wait, I’ll send video feedback to you.”

There was a crackle of static, and Baze’s holo disappeared, replaced by a view of what looked like ruins. The camera swung around to reveal the lithic skeleton of a city at the foot of a mesa, thousands of years older than NiJedha, and thousands of years dead before NiJedha was birthed. The buildings were roofless, rounded stumps, finer details of architecture long worn away by the desert. Steps tracked their way up the steep sides of the mesa. Perhaps there had been altars and temples at the top. She could hear the wind.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ve recorded all that. We can make a note of these ruins and let our archivists know.”

The ruins vanished, and Baze reappeared. “Chirrut wants to know how is that snake of his.”

“Ah Seh?” Sunhei flicked a glance over to the sleeping ophidian. “Asleep. Can’t he ask me himself?”

“Can’t. Because I’m here.” Baze looked awkward. “We are--not exactly on very friendly terms with each other. He thinks I’ve wronged him! Huh, how was I supposed to know about these sagwai, eh?”

Sunhei sighed. “You know, you two have been together for fifteen years or so.”

Baze didn’t say anything, but a scowl wrinkled the corners of his eyes.

“But he’s fine? And _you_ are alright?” she pressed.

“I’m healing. Chirrut is fine. He’s sitting in the speeder tuned in to the Holonet, listening to this Dawan person and this Luin person declare their forbidden love for each other while standing on a bridge over the Mysterious Lily Pond of Eternal Tranquillity and Wisdom and--actually, you know what? Never mind.”

Sunhei frowned. “Is that _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness_?”

“ _You_ follow that stupid drama as well?”

In the next room, Killi Gimm called something unintelligible to her. Something about her turn to do a prayer session with the novices.

“Killi likes it. So we tune in together for it. I do enjoy the opening song, though.” The words and the tune came to her. Bouli Kenn Meshanta’s keening treble. “ _Oh my beloved, will you take my heart…_ ”

“Okay, okay!” Baze growled. “I already know those lyrics!”

 

 

* * *

 

 

They were very near to the kyber mines. The air was different. Tenser. An excess of static discharge, prickly against the skin of Chirrut’s neck. He felt a mildly stinging fuzz cling to the tip of his tongue when he stuck it out between his lips.

The mines would be empty this time of the year, because of NaJedha’s position and proximity to Jedha. At this time, NaJedha dipped low in its orbit, swinging close to its moon, causing atmospheric disturbances and affecting the kyber crystal resonances. Electromagnetic pulses were frequent during this time, damaging capacitors and circuits, shorting the mining machinery.

Baze did most of the talking the whole day while piloting the speeder, which was a change. Mostly, he narrated their journey across the desert. Told Chirrut when they were passing through canyons, which cliffs, if he was taking any detours to avoid dust storms as detected by the navigation system.

The previous night, Chirrut hadn’t slept. Next to him, Baze snored, exhausted. Chirrut sat up in the middle of the night, put his hand on Baze’s shoulder to wake him up, and Baze, with a sleep-smeared affirmation allowed him to undo his robe and examine the sagwai wound with the tips of his fingers. The skin was healing fast and the affected area felt relatively healthy. Almost all the sagwai venom was gone, metabolised. Baze was strong.

He hadn’t gone back to sleep. For some time, he sat beside Baze, bolt upright, frowning in the dark. Then he’d got up and started practising zama-shiwo forms. It was a difficult practice because his thoughts were clouded and he couldn’t muster enough concentration to feel his body slide from stance to stance. The Force felt remote, a butterfly wing in the distance, just beyond the reach of his finger, a message that he couldn’t grasp.

“I’m going to take us on a detour around the Quartz Hills.” Baze’s voice disrupted his thoughts.

Chirrut didn’t answer.

“Chirrut.”

“I’m praying,” Chirrut said testily.

“You’re not praying. Your lips don’t move when you’re praying.”

“I think,” he said, ignoring Baze, “that we should go closer to the mines.”

“Funny. I was about to do the exact opposite.”

“We should go closer to the mines.”

“Will you at least tell me why?”

Chirrut was vaguely aware of his finger tracing spirals on the side of the speeder. He tightened his grip on his staff, feeling the uneti grain chafe against his palm. “I trust in the Force, and the Force is telling us to stick to this route.”

The caverns of kyber wound below them, labyrinths lit by the glow of kyber crystals. The crystals occurred at great densities here, but their resonances were chaotic, strings of air vibrating high and low. Unlike the crystal chambers beneath the Temple of the Whills. Disciples, Guardians and all the rest of the faithful communed with the kyber in the Temple, and those crystals flourished, resonating with the peoples of NiJedha. Out here in the mostly uninhabited wastes, the kyber was neglected, the energy of the Force insentient and chaotic, resonances unpolished by devotion or prayer or acknowledgement of the Force. The kyber crystals were of low grade, unblessed and unbalanced. For mining. For commercialisation purposes.

“Why would the Force want us to go near these mines?”

Chirrut shrugged. “Anyway, it’s the quickest route to get to Nhazardheh.”

Baze steered the speeder off the route plotted into the navigation system. As they flew closer to the mines, Chirrut felt the resonances of the kyber, ragged and quarrelsome and they brought him even less peace. The Force could not be felt, and he missed it dearly, missed its gentle reassurance gliding through his mind and muscle. There was no point in them taking this route after all. The Force didn’t come to him.

It was late afternoon when an electromagnetic pulse took out the speeder’s engines and systems. The tingling in Chirrut’s senses peaked and he heard the sharp high ring of the kyber. Then the engines died and the repulsors stuttered and failed. The speeder crashed to the ground, Baze cranking the steering to a hard left to avoid a cluster of boulders.

When they stopped spinning, Baze tried the engines. But they wouldn’t start. The comm system was dead as well.

Chirrut heard him slam a hand against the control yoke.

“EMP,” said Baze in a suspiciously neutral voice. “We don’t have the tools to repair the engines.”

“We can’t be far from the village,” Chirrut said. “We’ll leave everything here and walk, and then borrow a speeder and come back to pick up the med droid and other supplies.”

“It’s three days’ walk according to the last calculations from the nav system before everything crashed.”

Chirrut didn’t answer. The door of the speeder slid open and he got out. The world was all noise, indecipherable. The wind shifting the sand, the flap and billow of his robes against his body. All the terrain of the desert sprawled before him and he didn’t understand any of it.

His echo box was broken.

Then Baze was there, beside him, hand against his arm.

“Come on,” Baze said gruffly. “We’ll fix that at the village, when I find a new circuit board.”

“Go ahead and say it,” said Chirrut, after several hours of them both trudging along, Baze leading vaguely by his memory of the navigation system’s route. They kept stopping so he could puzzle out the compass points from the shadows of cliffs.

“Say what,” Baze said, flatly.

“You know what you want to say to me.”

“Oh, you read minds, do you? Well, I don’t. I’m not like you, Chirrut.” Baze adjusted a pack of supplies on his shoulders. Chirrut’s staff tapped against a loose pebble, and Baze kicked it out of the way.

“You want to tell me that this is all my fault. That you shouldn’t have listened to me about going near the kyber mines.”

“Would it make any difference now if I said so?”

“Hah! So you _do_ think it is my fault.”

“I said no such thing.” Baze was beginning to lose his temper because he knew full well that Chirrut was baiting him. Yet he was falling into the same old traps. Chirrut felt a blip of satisfaction at this, though he didn’t quite know why. “And since we’re speaking about this, just why don’t you tell me why we had to go so close to the mines?”

“I told you,” said Chirrut off-handedly. “I felt the Force. The Force was calling to me, telling me to choose that route.”

Truth be told, he had struggled with the Force recently. He had reached for it countless times during meditation, but he hadn’t been able to meditate in earnest, and so the Force always ducked out of reach, slipped through the frayed skeins of his concentration, skirted the disquiet of his thoughts. But perhaps if he was closer to the mines--those high densities of kyber--perhaps he might channel the Force with more clarity, or perhaps just sense the Force again, quieten down the anxiety that gnawed at the edges of his thoughts.

But Baze sensed that he wasn’t being entirely honest, because he exploded. “The Force? Really? Does the Force only speak to you because I definitely did _not feel_ the Force. Aren’t we both Guardians? Or does the Force have favourites now? If anything, I thought the Force was telling me to move as far away from the mines as possible. Or maybe that’s just common sense, since Sunhei already warned us.”

Chirrut had no wish to argue. “There is a reason why this happened. We cannot truly understand the workings of the Force.”

Baze stopped suddenly and gripped at Chirrut’s walking stick, his hand just above Chirrut’s, forcing him to halt as well.

“The problem with you,” Baze ground out the words, “is that you’re so self-righteous and arrogant sometimes, you can’t even admit you’re wrong. Why not just say so, huh, Chirrut Îmwe, and accept that you can be such a sanctimonious ass!”

Chirrut wrenched his staff away from Baze. Anger swarmed through him, anger at being caught out. Heat rose in his neck and cheeks. “Take that back.”

“No.” Baze was scornful.

“Then I’m walking on my own. I want you to maintain a ten foot radius from me.”

“You’ll trip and fall on your face without that echo box!”

“And you’re not allowed to help me.” His satisfaction peaked, not so much at the thought of tripping and falling on his face, but at the possibility of Baze being forced to stand and do nothing against his will.

Baze seized Chirrut by his shoulders. “You’re impossible, you know that!”

In response, Chirrut took Baze’s ear and pulled his head downwards and kissed him hard. Their teeth jarred together. An angry kiss, that made Chirrut even angrier. He shoved Baze away. “Ten foot radius.”

He stormed off, leaving behind Baze’s exasperated growl. There was a thud as Baze threw his pack on the ground.

Chirrut’s staff caught at a hole in the ground and he stumbled. Behind him, Baze started. But Chirrut caught his balance again, and so Baze didn’t come to him.

 

 

* * *

They stopped to rest in a rocky gully. Wordlessly, Baze led Chirrut down a twisting path in between desiccated trees and thorn bushes, dead fronds hanging from branches like rags. There were shells on the ground, a fine stratum of nacreous fragments that crunched and clicked underfoot.

They were still not talking to each other, but Baze walked as heavily as he could, putting as much noise in his tread so Chirrut could follow safely. There was an old monument in the gully, featureless with age, and they stopped to rest in its shade.

Chirrut’s silence had a pig-headed quality to it, but Baze was too worn out to coax speech out of him, to attempt reconciliation.

He felt the wound at his side. It had healed surprisingly fast.

“Baze,” said Chirrut, and he was startled. “What is there around us?”

He remembered. Chirrut’s echo box was broken, and Chirrut needed perspective.

“We’re in a gully. Thorn bushes around us. We’re in the shade of what looks like an old monument, but I can’t describe it any more to you, except it’s shaped a bit like a person kneeling. There are shells on the ground. There used to be water in this gully.”

“Water,” Chirrut repeated. The word sounded like thirst in his mouth, but he declined the rehydration flask that Baze offered him. “What else is there? And where exactly? I want to map them out.”

Baze took Chirrut’s hand, and pointed north with is. “There’s a cliff over there.” He moved Chirrut’s hand to the northeast. “A dead tree, it might have once been a changdui tree.” He moved Chirrut’s hand again, all the way opposite the cliff, so he is pointing south. “And south, far away, are mountains. The Lishtrali Ranges.”

He let go of Chirrut’s hand. Chirrut chewed on his lip, fingers tapping an internal rhythm against the wrist of his other hand.

“Imagine,” said Chirrut, pointing north, exactly where the cliff was, as Baze had shown him, “if that cliff is Dawan Dun-ec-Silin. In the last episode, she was about to reveal her tragic backstory to Luin. They were going to meet at a stormy clifftop.”

“Not that show again!”

“And Luin could be that shrivelled tree.” Chirrut pointed northeast, directly at the tree. “He always did have a bit of a bad temper. He was about to get ambushed by a band of robbers, by the way. They ended the chapter on a bit of a cliffhanger.”

“You already detailed to me the plot of the latest episode.” Baze picked a shell off the ground, a large piece, brittle, corrugated, the armour of strange creatures that no longer lived on Jedha. “You want to know what happens next?”

“Do _you_ know?” said Chirrut with disbelief.

“Yes. I already told you. That Luin person is going to marry that Dawan person. Double happiness, another story wrapped up. The end. Same old drama.”

“You wait and see. Things aren’t always what you expect them to be.”

“Words of wisdom,” Baze said. “But they don’t apply to this holodrama of yours.”

He took Chirrut’s hand and put the shell in it. Closed his fingers gently around its curves, let him run a thumb over the smooth, glittering nacre.

“We don’t see any of these back home,” he said.

Baze moved to take his hand away, but Chirrut stopped him, held on tight. The shell dropped through the space between them, into the ground.

“I’m sorry,” Chirrut said, slowly, “for everything that you think I ought to be sorry for.”

Baze felt a twang of guilt. Chirrut was sincere. But he didn’t enjoy seeing Chirrut apologise.

“No need,” he said, curtly. Then: “I’ve got my own share of apologising to do.”

Chirrut pulled Baze toward him. Spoke against his mouth. “Then let’s stop fighting for awhile.”

“Yes, let’s,” said Baze. He kissed Chirrut. His throat felt parched. He smelt the dust and grime in his skin and robes, and in Chirrut’s own skin and clothing. But he felt all the fatigue of the past few days slip away when he held Chirrut, all the thirst melt away. The constant dull throb of the sagwai wound on his hip was forgotten. It couldn’t have been that long ago since they’d kissed or held each other this tenderly, but their meandering journey across the desert had somehow isolated them from home, taken things out of perspective, turned them against each other countless times, and brought them back to each other again. He’d always find his way back to Chirrut, this was a given.

Chirrut’s kiss turned a little more desperate, his fingers digging into the back of Baze’s head. Baze responded, dragging his mouth off the line of Chirrut’s mouth, down his chin, to his neck.

“I don’t have anything to make you more comfortable,” he breathed against the pulse in Chirrut’s throat.

“I never asked to be comfortable.”

He pushed Chirrut against the stone of the old monument, silently praying that this wasn’t the holy site of some ancient faith or another, pulled at the belt holding Chirrut’s robes in place and worked the layers of fabric loose. He heard the bitten-down moan coming from Chirrut, felt Chirrut through the thin layer of his under-robe. Hard. When he looked up, he saw the strained line of Chirrut’s neck, the filaments of veins pushing against the surface of his skin, his palms pressed against the rock, back arched and unseeing gaze flung to the skies. He stared at Chirrut like that, until Chirrut became impatient, thrusted his hips towards Baze and reached a tender but insistent hand to the back of Baze’s head.

When he took Chirrut’s length in his mouth, Chirrut groaned, a long, liquid sound of relief, pulled free from his throat. Baze thought he heard his name fused somewhere in that sound, unsticking from the depths of Chirrut's throat. He savoured the noise of Chirrut's incoherence. He worked his mouth, sliding along Chirrut’s length, trying to ignore his own arousal, his own need.

“B-Baze,” Chirrut stuttered as he came, spurting into the back of Baze’s throat. He held Chirrut until he stopped shuddering.

Then he brought himself up to Chirrut’s level again, Chirrut pulling him in for a kiss. He rutted against Chirrut, pressed against him. Chirrut reached a hand between them, took hold of Baze’s cock and made short work of him.

They slid together, boneless, down the side of the rock, to the ground, breath still heaving through them, their joint pulses so loud that they shook with each other’s heartbeat, half-laughing, half-gasping, kissing, nipping at each other's throats, chins, ears. Baze vaguely wondered about cleaning up.

But instead, Chirrut lay down on the ground and closed his eyes against the bright sky. “Lie down with me for a bit, Baze.”

“Taking a nap? We need to walk as much as we can in the daylight.”

“Not a nap,” said Chirrut. “Just a rest. We both need one.”

So Baze did. He lay next to Chirrut in the shade of that old monument, curled himself against Chirrut so their bodies socketed into each other. For a few precious minutes, neither of them so much as twitched. It seemed as though all the desert stopped, just for a few ticks, dropped to its haunches to listen to them. And they gave no sound back to it.

 

 

* * *

Thirty-six years Jasa Parlo had lived out here in the wilderness, at the top of the windswept Rokanya Cliffs, and never had they seen a sight as strange as the two men emerging out of the nothingness of the desert. They appeared early one evening, when Jasa was checking on their vaporators. The sun was a washed-out stain in the sky, and the scarp-nightjars had begun their nocturnal chorus, and the two men were grainy outlines in the uncertain light, gathering shape as they drew closer.

For starters, both wore the vestments of the Guardians of the Whills, an order that Jasa had not seen or heard of for many years. They must have travelled far, all the way from NiJedha, because the Guardians were an urban order, subscribers to the Whills Canon, a collection of recorded texts and scriptures that held little sway over Jasa.

One of them was blind. He had wax-pale eyes and a crooked uneti staff, fortified in fire. The other one seemed to be something of a guide, walking close behind the blind one, not touching, but always vigilant, ready to catch his companion if he so much as stubbed a toe.

And yet despite that, there was an invisible wall between them. Something obstinate. The same obstinacy that wedged them apart also held them fast.

“You’re on the wrong way to Nhazardheh,” Jasa said. They gestured ahead. The ground dropped away sharply, thousands of feet onto the valley and plains below. “You could walk around these cliffs, but it will take a week on foot. And I would not recommend scaling down them.”

“Is there no other way off these cliffs?” the blind one asked. Chirrut Îmwe, he’d introduced himself.

“We could wait here. Sunhei will send others to look for us,” said the other, who went by the name of Baze Malbus.

Jasa didn’t remember extending an invitation to either of them to wait here at their home, but it had been some time since they’d been in the company of other sentients, so perhaps the manners of society had changed in the interim. Perhaps it was now a norm for everyone to invite themselves into others’ abodes as and when they pleased.

Jasa’s own lodgings was a hollowed-out space in a rock, which was really a large bell-shaped stupa, a monument from yet another one of the lost peoples of Jedha. Smoke ribboned out of the makeshift chimney, at the top of the stupa.

“We can’t stay around here and wait,” said the one called Imwe. “The people of Nhazardheh are still awaiting delivery of the med-droid. Sitting around and doing nothing—that isn’t the way of the Force.”

“It’s a well-known fact that the Force is open to interpretation,” the one called Malbus countered.

Jasa finished resetting their vaporators for the night. “Are you two married?”

“If we were,” said Baze Malbus, “I’d be dead by now. From accelerated aging. A side-effect of having to put up with _him_ each day. Although I already do that, so perhaps I’m dead and this whole trip is nothing but a dead man’s dream.”

Chirrut Imwe retorted back, “It’s not my fault that you were born an ancient bad-tempered nag.”

“There is a quicker way off these cliffs, down into the Mizzul Valley.” Jasa cut in. Being caught in the crossfire of this kind of domestic spat was a disconcerting experience, a glimpse into private lives that Jasa felt should _definitely_ remain private. But what did they know—they had lived thirty-six years alone, after all. “But it’s too late now. Light’s nearly gone. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

The Guardians did end up spending the night in Jasa’s small stupa-house after all. There was hardly enough space for all three of them, especially once spare mats and bedding had been laid across the floor. Jasa boiled freeze-dried meat and bread they had baked, and brought them cups of tea.

They argued a lot, those two. They called each other fools and ass-brains and berated each other for having to put up with each other. They argued when their teacups got mixed up. They argued over the way they laid out the bedding. They fought over which constellations would be rising at night, which winds were blowing, which months of the year were good for collecting phaimai eggs, and the best way to eat said eggs. They argued about the canonical texts of the Whills. They quarrelled about some people called Dawan and Luin, and whether those two were going to end up together, married happily ever after. All evening long, they quarrelled.

Funny. Jasa had always thought the Guardians of the Whills were a peaceable and dignified order, valuing silence and meditation on the mysteries of the Force.

After dinner, Chirrut sat on the doorstep while Baze offered to clean out Jasa’s cooker and wash up. Jasa went to stand by Chirrut, who nodded his head in acknowledgement, his eyes shut. Perhaps he was meditating. A moth fluttered past him, and in a flash, Chirrut raised his hand and plucked it right out of its trajectory, caught it in on his knuckle with unsettling precision.

“This,” said Chirrut, “is—a common dune monarch.”

“Yes, it is,” Jasa lied.

Chirrut's smile faded. “You can tell me what it really is.”

“Don’t pity him because he doesn’t deserve it,” Baze called out from amidst the clatter of bowls.

Jasa shifted from foot to foot, guilt and curiosity spiking through him. “It's a penumbral fritillary, dirge-of-the-desert, as it is called in these parts.”

“Is it really?” Chirrut’s smile flashed back on as he gently exhaled at the prim wings, spotted grey and blue like feverish eyes staring out. The moth took off. “Never thought I'd catch one of those.”

At night, when Jasa lay down to sleep, both Guardians went outside into the cold. Neither returned for a long time, and they fell asleep long before the Guardians came back in.

Early the next morning, both Guardians were awake before Jasa. Baze Malbus was passing Jasa’s crude tea through a strainer and Chirrut Îmwe was outside, practicing what must be zama-shiwo, that olden art of the Guardians. He didn’t seem to notice the cold.

When they had all finished breakfast, Jasa showed the Guardians their glider.

It was a crude kite-like contraption that Jasa had built with their own hands, sewing together the flexible sailcloth wings, twisting and nailing the triangular wooden frame into place, attaching the complicated bantha-hide double harness and ancillary parachute pack.

“It isn’t the safest means of transportation, and I haven’t flown it for years,” Jasa said. “But it will save you a week.”

Chirrut ran his hands over the straps and the sides of the long sailcloth wings, the frame, the control bar.

“I should tell you,” Jasa said, “that the last time I flew it, I may have got stuck on an overhang of rock. Can’t remember the details as it was about twelve years ago.”

“I think we’ll walk,” said Baze, at the same time as Chirrut, who said, “We’ll take it!

 

 

* * *

Chirrut had the upper hand in their latest argument.

“I can fly alone if you don’t want to come,” he told Baze. “Maybe it’s a good idea after all--if you wait here for Sunhei to send in other Guardians, while I go on ahead and see if I can reach the village.”

“You know I won’t let you do that,” Baze growled.

“Yes.” The corners of Chirrut’s eyes crinkled into a negligible smile. “I do.”

So Jasa Parlo, the strange recluse who lived in a hollowed-out rock at the top of the Rokanya Cliffs, helped them both into the harness and strapped them together. They leashed Chirrut’s staff to the frame of the glider, checked the makeshift mechanical altimeter and tested their straps. The kyber sliver in Chirrut’s staff rang a shimmering note from the crystal containment lamp. Chirrut took a deep breath and held the note in the space between his eyes, the long pure sound of it haloing his thoughts.

“Thank you for putting up with us,” Chirrut told the recluse. “Especially him.”

He gestured at Baze, who snorted and proceeded to ignore him.

“Your company has been interesting,” said Jasa. “I never knew much about the Guardians—always thought they spent their time in prayer and silence.”

“Fervent discourse is one of our practices as well,” Chirrut said.

Baze snorted and laughed. “I suppose we make a good pair then.”

Jasa yanked the frame and control bar towards Baze and Chirrut. “Pull at the bar and lean towards the direction you want to go. That will realign the wings. Or at least I hope it will. Did I mention that I haven't flown it in twelve years? Are you sure you don't want to wait for your friends to pick you up? It's probably safer.”

“Not at all,” said Chirrut at the same time as Baze answered, “That does seem like the most sensible choice.”

Jasa shook their head. “Well, may the Force go with you. I believe that is the standard greeting these days?”

“And the Force of Others with you too,” said Chirrut, pleased.

He closed his eyes. He couldn't see the terrain, but sensed the pressure differentials in the air. In his mind’s eye, the cliffs stood absolute against the blinding blue block of a sky. The Mizzul Valley thousands of feet below, a speckle of habitation, which was Nhazardheh. And beyond everything, the desert, always the desert.

“The cliffs curve inward in the east, so stay away from that side,” said Jasa. Above them, the sailcloth tugged and rustled, ignited into movement by a strong gust. “Aim for the dunes just north of Nhazardheh.”

“Alright,” said Baze. His voice and his presence was sturdy, infallible. “If we're going to abandon all reason and do something stupid, we might as well make a start. Let's fly this kite.”

They backed away from the cliff edge. Further, further.

“When I say go, start to run forward. I'll give us a count to three,” Baze said. “One--”

“Let’s go!” Chirrut shouted, ignoring him and began running, pulling Baze along. Baze didn’t even have time to raise a sigh.

They began a loping run, heading toward what felt like the end of reason. As they neared the drop, Chirrut felt a strange, almost savage need power him forwards. He was ready to collide with a solid wall of air. An emptiness so vast that it diminished him to nothing more than a single grain in the desert. The ground unspooled beneath their feet, sending them to its end, but the wind slid beneath the sailcloth, caught them and hoisted them off in an updraught before they even reached the cliff edge, and just like that, they were launched into the miraculous, breathless expanse of flight.

Even if his echo box were working, it would be useless to him up here. He opened his mouth to say something to Baze, and perhaps Baze was also yelling something at him, but there were no words.

The wind fluxed through Chirrut’s body and drained any possibility of speech and sound. Adrenaline bolted through his limbs. There were no words up here. There were no arguments.

He allowed himself to drift into the circular mantras of zama-shiwo. The Force came back to him, eddying around him like the wandering isobars in a local Jedhan weather broadcast.

_The Force is with me and I am one with the Force_.

All the noise of the wind died down into stillness. Peace, an endless coil of it with no centre, a slow hypnotic vortex pulling Chirrut in.

A thermal lifted the glider higher. The frame shifted. Baze cranked at the control bar, trying to manoeuvre them toward the direction of the village. The frame shifted reluctantly into Baze’s intended angle.

In the Force, Baze’s presence was complete. Beside him, Baze was ballast and vitality. Baze was everything to Chirrut. He thought of the time a few days back, when Baze had stood, a solitary figure in the middle of the treacherous Khashan Plains. And how Chirrut had got off the speeder, tested the ground. His echo box clicked an absurd sequence at him, provided a feed of contradicting images. The ground promised nothing. The landscape was closed off to him, hostile and Baze was out there, surrounded by hostility.

All Chirrut felt was emptiness, and those level plains seemed tunnelled through with deception. The only point of solid reference that the echo box gave him was Baze, Baze walking away from Chirrut, receding, the clicks growing weaker with each step further from him. Chirrut remembered the tang of fear, the bile at the back of his throat, the surge of his pulse, as he’d shouted at Baze to come back.

And when Baze fell into one of the sagwai holes, Chirrut sensed the hopelessness coming from him, and then the presence of Baze began to lose its definition. Somehow, Chirrut knew that he was on the verge of losing Baze, and in that moment of terror, he also realised that Baze was ready to be lost, to let go in that same senseless moment.

Now, however, they soared in frozen time, in perfect flight and perfect silence. His hand drifted over to Baze’s, gripping the control bar. He closed his cold fingers over the back of Baze’s gloved hand.

“We’re nearly there,” said Baze, his voice pared down to a whisper.

Baze wrestled once again with the control bar, trying to shift the arthritic frame of the glider. It complied for a little bit, then it angled away again. Something was amiss. The way Baze began tugging harder at the bar. The drop in altitude.

“What’s wrong?” Chirrut shouted but Baze didn’t answer.

Then he felt it: a tremendous jolt, tremors shattering through the frame and harness. The sound of sailcloth ripping.

They had scraped against the side of the cliff and snagged the wings on the jutting rocks. The rush of air moving against Chirrut’s face was wrong - a wrong slant, a wrong velocity, and there was a loose flap of sailcloth thwacking off the frame. The glider tilted with Chirrut’s side tipping downward.

“How far is the ground?” he shouted at Baze.

“About eight hundred feet!” Baze howled back. “Six, five hundred, don’t know!”

“We’ll crash if we keep at this rate.”

“I’ll release the parachute!” But Chirrut could feel the frenzy of his movement, fumbling with the release mechanism.

The parachute wouldn’t be enough. They were too near the ground and too heavy. But he didn’t have the strength to keep shouting anymore. It hurt his head to talk in this storm of spinning and falling. He reached over to Baze. Baze didn’t notice when Chirrut slid his knife out of its sheath.

Chirrut reached for the Force again. The Force gathered around him, holding him still. There was that beat of peace, that iridescent note of kyber somewhere in his staff, still leashed to the juddering frame. And he was aware of Baze. His whole life and Baze’s, all their arguments, complicatedness, pettiness, all the things they’d learnt of each other, the ways they touched and held each other, the words they hurled at each other, the words they comforted each other with, the enormity and the sheer novelty of just having a life in constant tangle with his own--all of that now filled Chirrut up, made him swell with the fiercest of gratitude, the deepest of affection. He looked toward Baze, and felt all the affection in the world for him. The razor edges of love that were going to slice his throat open from the inside out with all the words of forgiveness he could not beg from Baze Malbus.

At what point should these lives so tautly wound together be separated? Chirrut knew the answer.

_Now_ , said the Force and _now_ , rang the kyber spark in his heart, and Chirrut began sawing at the harness with the knife.

By the time Baze noticed, it was too late.

“Chirrut!” he shouted. “ _Don’t_!”

The parachute bloomed above the wrecked glider in an explosion of fabric at the same time as Chirrut cut himself loose. He couldn’t see, but the glider now seemed static, hovering in frail balance, and he was satisfied.

_Parachutes are for the faithless_ , was the last coherent (and completely ridiculous) thought in his head, before he fell into the endless spiral of calm.

 

 

* * *

“You, Sunhei Manra, are destined to become a Venerable Master Disciple of the Whills by the ripe old age of twenty-three. You will receive three hundred and twelve suitors and you’ll marry all of them, and your weddings will last for sixteen years. You will--”

“I know how this ends,” Sunhei had interrupted Chirrut crossly, all those years ago when they were playing their usual games. “I fall into a rancor pit and get eaten by a rancor, which is actually Baze. All your rubbish prophecies end this way. You have no imagination at all.”

A large fritillary sat on his nose, the tail wings beating against his lips. It had pollen-dusted wings, printed with a rather marvellous pattern of green-jade patches framed in a delicate curlicued black lattice. Chirrut was rather proud that he’d managed to catch it with his nose.

“No,” said Chirrut. “This time it’s a sarlacc pit.”

“I am _not_ a sarlacc,” Baze had protested. And as payback, he clapped his hands hard and sent the fritillary on its way.

“What did you do that for! That was a rare one to catch!” Chirrut shouted.

“You know what? I can read my own fortunes. I don’t even need any stupid insects.” Sunhei began to lose her temper. “I, Sunhei Manra, will be plagued by two idiots that go by the name of Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus for the rest of my life. There is no escape, because they are the rancor and the rancor’s pit that I am trapped in.”

That was a long time ago. Years and years ago.

Now, only Baze sat at the other end of the transmission beaming from Sunhei’s holopad, slumped over a positively archaic looking communications bank, his head in his hands. He looked like a ghost.

“The village medic is looking after him. I don’t know what he was--I don’t know what--I just don’t know.”

“But he survived,” said Sunhei. “He’s healing.”

Baze had cracked over the transmission when he’d first told her about Chirrut. He’d stayed tongue-tied for the longest time after making the call. He broke apart slowly, his grief a terrible tectonic process moving through his facial muscles, uprooting any semblance of calm or the usual stoicity he maintained over transmissions. He dissolved into mostly dry sobs that he tried to smother down with talk but failed.

“Baze Malbus,” Sunhei had said, “Where is Chirrut Îmwe?”

The sound of Chirrut’s name was a klaxon to Baze. He jerked to attention, covered his face and stopped. And he told her everything. He wasn’t clear about the details, and by the end of his halting account, all Sunhei could grasp was that Chirrut had fallen, Chirrut was injured, Chirrut was unresponsive, but Chirrut was alive, but Chirrut was alive.

It had been some four days since the accident, and Baze had checked in with Sunhei everyday.

She had to resist, sometimes, to ask just exactly _why_ these two reckless and idiot Guardians thought it was a good idea to jump off a cliff, strung up by some homemade kite belonging to a desert hermit, but now wasn’t the time. The whole thing was quite possibly Chirrut’s idea, though. Baze was more sensible, until it came to Chirrut. Then he became pliable, then he could be manoeuvred along the silliest choices and pathways, following the ludicrous, brash beacon of Chirrut Îmwe. He would follow Chirrut anywhere-- off a cliff, into a rancor’s pit, off on month-long assignments to the middle of the desert.

“He will be alright. He will heal,” Sunhei said.

She couldn’t be certain, but if she knew one thing it was this: that Baze and Chirrut had all the stubbornness in the world toward each other, that neither would budge when it came to each other, and that they would always hold each other in place. If Chirrut woke up, they would be okay, as far as Sunhei knew.

A bell clanged six times, and from the courtyard rose a swell of syllables, blending into a long wave of a chant. There were many pilgrims gathered there. Killi was down with them, and Sunhei knew she had to leave Baze behind.

“You know the deal,” said Sunhei firmly. Baze took his face out of his hands, turned his haggard eyes toward her. “You are on vigil. Mark sun-up, mark sun-down, if you don’t have bells, ring the days with your voice. Pray the same prayers, and while waiting for the answers, answer the prayers of others.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with anything.” Baze’s voice is gruff.

“You’re not as helpless as you think. And neither is Chirrut.”

Baze didn’t look like he believed her. But she knew him well enough. He would listen. He needed her to tell him that. Him and Chirrut, sometimes they seemed invulnerable together, so attuned to each other’s movements, talk, resonances. And sometimes they were just like every other person. Sometimes they seemed so ordinary in their dependence on each other, in their isolation, in how brittle they were when detached from each other.

The present was a vigil for them. Sunhei went out to pray, following the summons of the bells.

 

 

* * *

About Chirrut Îmwe, Guardian of the Whills: what about him that Baze doesn’’t know?

After all, they live together, the same rooms at the back of the Serendipity Sculpture Garden in the Temple of the Kyber, but this is only one thing. They are both Guardians of the Whills, but again, this is just another thing.

The pilgrims love Chirrut, and so do the Disciples of the Whills, in particular, Sunhei Manra. So do the children who visit the Temple for weekly lessons. When Chirrut was fourteen, he’d cracked his ribs after he miscalculated and fell while jumping the poles in the forecourt. He’d sparred countless times with Baze in the training yard, and they both have a running tally that keeps on running over the years, the victories and the losses and the grudging stalemates they sometimes can’t avoid. In the past, he kept misplacing the simplest of things, right until he became blind. Then when he lost his sight, when his eyes bleached in sunshine and his gaze turned spectral, his memory sharpened, became uncanny and soon Chirrut never forgot where he’d ever placed his shoes, his cups of tea, his spare credits.

If you want to look for him, there’s a good chance you’ll find him sitting for hours on the Temple steps with his eyes closed, staff between his knees, his forehead leaning against the handle. Perhaps he’ll be meditating, or chanting the mantras of the Whills. But more than likely, he’ll be listening to his portable radio, tuned into his favourite channel, which broadcasts Alderaanian soap operas (with actual opera). Chirrut’s favourite radio drama is _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness._

Sometimes Chirrut chooses to meditate or practise zama-shiwo at the most infuriating of times, including late at night, or when a dust storm is about to hit and everyone in the city is scrambling for shelter, and then Chirrut will all of a sudden stop, turn to Baze, saying, “Now. Now is the time.’ And then he will run off to some rooftop or balcony, fully exposed to the oncoming storm, and begin his prayers, negotiating his own peace in the onslaught of the elements.

Chirrut Îmwe likes tea, including steaming hot tarine tea, which Baze does not tolerate. He likes sitting at his beloved noodle stall in the souk close to midnight, after vesper prayers, drinking extra-sweet caf, jesting with the proprietor, and slurping on his favourite oily blood and marrow soup.

Chirrut also has all the luck of the world. Or perhaps he might say that it is all the Force, everything is the Force, and the Force is with him.

For how else could Baze have found him, strung up in a balding thicket of knotted bushes at the bottom of a dead riverbed. Shattered ribs, dislocated shoulders, broken arm bones, contusions in the brain, ruptured spleen, pelvic injury, internal bleeding in countless parts of his body, and miraculously, nothing else.

Baze had landed, trapped beneath the twisted frame and ripped sailcloth of the glider, bubbled beneath the fabric, in pain and shock. For a brief moment, he didn't move, suffocating at the awful possibility that Chirrut was lying somewhere in the harsh landscape, unable to ever get up again and that he, Baze was here, alive. Then, the sagwai wound on his side throbbed so fiercely, startling him into action. He wondered if the wound had burst open. He hacked his way out of the snarls of fabric and went staggering out, looking for where Chirrut had fallen, even as he heard the buzz of an approaching speeder.

Later, he would learn that the villagers from Nhazardheh had seen the glider falling like a very large bird with a broken wing, tumbling from the sky.

The days that passed after that were numb, hushed, Chirrut was taken to the village clinic and nursed by the local physician and their outdated med-droid. Vaguely, Baze recalled something about a med-droid, the reason they had come all this way out into the middle of nowhere.

The reason, like the reasons for most things, seemed irrelevant and lost.

Until after two days of sitting mutely by an equally mute Chirrut, he mustered the strength to borrow a holopad and contact Sunhei.

He talks to Sunhei every night now, updating her on Chirrut. He's healing, says the local physician, but for some reason, the swelling in his brain has yet to die down. But he's healing. Healing in his own silence, in his own peace.

So Baze waits. Sunhei tells him each time, _you are on vigil. Answer the prayers of others while waiting your turn._

She tells him to do things as simple as eat dinner, remember the chants, go and knock on doors and offer help as a Guardian of the Whills.

She keeps Baze functioning for the time being. He borrows a speeder and flies back out to the desert to retrieve the supplies he and Chirrut had had to abandon after being hit by the electromagnetic pulse from the kyber mines. He fixes that other speeder (with a few extra modifications, an additional exhaust system, plus a gear to the crankshaft to power a supercharger and a few extra fittings from parts he'd managed to scrounge from the local garage). He helps assemble the new med-droid, delivers their supplies to the clinic. He assists the village monk with some of their duties, most of which involve bestowing a lot of blessings on different things. Blessing the plantings, blessing well water, blessing new structures set up in the village.

One time, a young couple shyly approach Baze and ask if he will officiate their marriage. They've never seen a holy man before, from such an old and famous urban order. The village monk doesn’t count, apparently.

“Holy man?” Despite everything, Baze finds himself smiling. “I know one who is truly blessed by the Force, though he sure is taking his time to get out of bed.”

He agrees to do it, though. The two brides, barely out of their teenage years, marry in the village’s community meeting hall, which has a strange, gnarled desert tree standing in its centre. The tree, like most trees in the Jedhan desert is dead, but covered with flame-red lichens, and for the wedding, the families had hung up streamers of gold fluttering from its spines. Baze reads them their vows, gives them the blessing, like how he’s seen Sunhei pour the blessings of the Whills to those who come to the Temple to wed.

All through the ceremony, a knot ties itself in his stomach and a lump builds in his throat, as the realisation takes root in his mind.

What did that strange old hermit on the cliff ask them?

_Are you two married_?

The question hadn’t even affected him, not until now.

When Chirrut wakes up, maybe he’ll ask the question that these two brides, draped in orange silk with powder dusted on their eyelids, with looping snake bracelets wound around their wrists, tying them together for the length of the whole ceremony, must have asked each other once.

Maybe someday. Maybe one day both Baze and Chirrut will yield to each other. Maybe one day they’ll take each other’s hand and will never let go again. After all, it’s not something they haven’t been doing all this while. After all, it’s just more words.

  


 

In the evening, Baze goes back to watching over Chirrut. His torso is bandaged, his arms in slings. But he’s healing. _But he’s healing_. The new med-droid wheels around its first ever patient, checking on monitors, intravenous fluid stands, calculated dosages, bacta applications.

Baze borrows a portable radio and streams each new broadcasted episode of _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness_ to Chirrut each night. And sometimes (quietly, though) he will hum the lyrics of Bouli Kenn Meshanta’s song.

_Oh my beloved_  
_Will you take my heart_  
_Will you take my hand and lead me to where all the wishes go?_

Those awful corny lyrics. The tune has wormed its way into his head. (He absolutely refuses to yodel, though, like Bouli).

The series of _Astral Kindred, Double Happiness_ concludes that night. Turns out that Baze is wrong about the ending after all. Dawan Dun-ec-Silin and Luin Dil don’t marry each other-- Dawan ends up marrying Luin’s sister, and Luin ends up marrying Dawang’s sister, and the mysterious yueqin playing stranger who seems to be stirring up civil war between the warring family factions is no villain, but the biological father of Luin Dil, who is a misunderstood figure only wanting the love and acceptance of a family.

It _is_ a truly terrible plotline after all. Chirrut will be happy when he wakes up.

Sunhei is right. He has to keep functioning. And as he does, he gathers words, little things to tell Chirrut, little questions, little realisations. Declarations, tears, all of the words he holds in him, all of the love he holds for Chirrut. Sometimes he can barely stand to breathe, not when every breath is loaded with expectation and the greatest and the frailest of hope.

And when Chirrut wakes up at last, Baze takes his hand, kisses his fingers, his wrist, unsure why these stupid tears keep falling because he’s happy, he swears by the Force he’s happy, he’s the happiest man of all and he doesn’t know why, and all the things he wants to tell Chirrut, he forgets them all. Just like that.

Chirrut understands, though. Because he cracks a slow smile, the nebulae of his eyes opening wide and gentle and familiar, Baze’s name on his lips.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! It is much appreciated. :) this story shouldn't have been this long, and with not so much hand-wavey concepts everywhere. Still don't know how to write in this fandom after all this time...
> 
> I'm at tumblr @anagrammaddict


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